July 26, 2012

I've been working with a global financial services firm to develop its marketing analytics / intelligence capability, and we're now building a highly capable team to further extend and sustain the results and lessons so far. This includes a Marketing Analytics Director to lead a strong team doing advanced data mining and predictive modeling to support high-impact opportunities in various areas of the firm. Here's the job description on LinkedIn. If you are currently working at a large marketer, major analytics consulting firm, or advertising agency, and have significant experience analyzing, communicating, and implementing sophisticated multi-channel marketing programs, and are up for the challenge of leading a new team in this area for a world-class firm in a great city, please get in touch!

July 23, 2012

As many of you know (having been barraged with a Twit-tensity worthy of @justinbieber), Saturday I rode in the Nashoba Learning Group annual bike-a-thon. Nashoba Learning Group is a school in Bedford Massachusetts for children with Autistic Spectrum disorders. Our family has been involved with the school since its founding over a decade ago; it now has 90 students. It achieves wonderful results, and shares what it learns generously. And now we're also building an adult program as well.

This year's ride was among the most beautiful I can remember -- a lovely, relatively cool and dry New England summer day. Nonetheless, experience has taught me to seek any advantage possible. So, at breakfast, I spied this number, and imagined the drafting possibilities of a one-machine peloton:

Perhaps it should have concerned me that its crew looked a little strange:

Nonetheless, I smiled back, and off we went!

10 miles into my admittedly parasitic strategy (Hey, I did offer to take my turn at the front, but I think they laughed), I thought I heard "Activate les contre-measures!" I thought I saw tacks, but I really can't be sure. Slowly though, the sound of the breeze in my ears was replaced with a slow hiss...

I pulled over, and wistfully waved on the vanguard of riders offering their help. No matter! My wife knows I live for moments like this, when I can break out the tools I so rarely get to use!

Furiously I pedaled - no, clawed - my way back. Well, scratched a bit. Let's just say it was a nice day for a ride.

Thank you again so much to all of the incredibly generous people who supported NLG this year!

Hi folks, a reminder to please sponsor me for this year's NLG Bike-a-thon! Here's the link to the donations site. Below for your reading pleasure is my recap of the 2007 ride. Thank you!

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"Friends,

Thank you all for being so generous on such short notice!

Fresh off a flight from London that arrived in Boston at midnight on Friday, I wheeled myself onto the starting line Saturday morning a few minutes after eight . Herewith, a few journal entries from the ride:

Mile 2: The peloton drops me like a stone. Dopeurs! Never mind; this breakaway is but le petit setback. Where are my domestiquesto bring me back to the pack?

What strategic path for Yahoo! satisfies the following important requirements?

Solves a keenly felt customer / user / audience / human problem?

Fits within but doesn't totally overlap what other competitors provide?

Builds off things Yahoo! has / does well?

Fits Ms. Mayer's experiences, so she's playing from a position of strength and confidence?

As a consequence of all this, will bring advertisers back at premium prices?

Yahoo!'s company profile is a little buzzwordy but offers a potential point of departure. What Yahoo! says:

"Our vision is to deliver your world, your way. We do that by using technology, insights, and intuition to create deeply personal digital experiences that keep more than half a billion people connected to what matters the most to them – across devices, on every continent, in more than 30 languages. And we connect advertisers to the consumers who matter to them most – the ones who will build their businesses – through our unique combination of Science + Art + Scale."

What Cesar infers:

Yahoo! is a filter.

Here are some big things the Internet helps us do:

Find

Connect

Share

Shop

Work

Learn

Argue

Relax

Filter

Every one of these functions has an 800 lb. gorilla, and a few aspirants, attached to it:

Um, filter... Filter. There's a flood of information out there. Who's doing a great job of filtering it for me? Google alerts? Useful but very crude. Twitter? I browse my followings for nuggets, but sometimes these are hard to parse from the droppings. Facebook? Sorry friends, but my inner sociopath complains it has to work too hard to sift the news I can use from the River of Life.

Filtering is still a tough, unsolved problem, arguably the problem of the age (or at least it was last year when I said so). The best tool I've found for helping me build filters is Yahoo! Pipes. (Example)

As far as I can tell, Pipes has remained this slightly wonky tool in Yahoo's bazaar suite of products. Nerds like me get a lot of leverage from the service, but it's a bit hard to explain the concept, and the semi-programmatic interface is powerful but definitely not for the general public.

Now, what if Yahoo! were to embrace filtering as its core proposition, and build off the Pipes idea and experience under the guidance of Google's own UI guru -- the very same Ms. Mayer, hopefully applying the lessons of iGoogle's rise and fall -- to make it possible for its users to filter their worlds more effectively? If you think about it, there are various services out there that tackle individual aspects of the filtering challenge: professional (e.g. NY Times, Vogue, Car and Driver), social (Facebook, subReddits), tribal (online communities extending from often offline affinities), algorithmic (Amazon-style collaborative filtering), sponsored (e.g., coupon sites). No one is doing a good job of pulling these all together and allowing me to tailor their spews to my life. Right now it's up to me to follow Gina Trapani's Lifehacker suggestion, which is to use Pipes.

OK so let's review:

Valuable unsolved problem for customers / users: check.

Fragmented, undominated competitive space: check.

Yahoo! has credibly assets / experience: check.

Marissa Mayer plays from position of strength and experience: check.

Advertisers willing to pay premium prices, in droves: ...

Well, let's look at this a bit. I'd argue that a good filter is effectively a "passive search engine". Basically through the filters people construct -- effectively "stored searches" -- they tell you what it is they are really interested in, and in what context and time they want it. With cookie-based targeting under pressure on multiple fronts, advertisers will be looking for impression inventories that provide search-like value propositions without the tracking headaches. Whoever can do this well could make major bank from advertisers looking for an alternative to the online ad biz Hydra (aka Google, Facebook, Apple, plus assorted minor others).

Savvy advertisers and publishers will pooh-pooh the idea that individual Pipemakers would be numerous enough or consistent enough on their own to provide the reach that is the reason Yahoo! is still in business. But I think there's lots of ways around this. For one, there's already plenty of precedent at other media companies for suggesting proto-Pipes -- usually called "channels", Yahoo! calls them "sites" (example), and they have RSS feeds. Portals like Yahoo!, major media like the NYT, and universities like Harvard suggest categories, offer pre-packaged RSS feeds, and even give you the ability to roll your own feed out of their content. The problem is that it's still marketed as RSS, which even in this day and age is still a bit beyond for most folks. But if you find a more user-friendly way to "clone and extend" suggested Pipes, friends' Pipes, sponsored Pipes, etc., you've got a start.

Check? Lots of hand-waving, I know. But what's true is that Yahoo! has suffered from a loss of a clear identity. And the path to re-growing its value starts with fixing that problem.

July 11, 2012

Via my friends at VisualIQ, this wonderful post from Avinash Kaushik on doing multi-channel attribution and mix optimization in the real world. Plus a really rich set of conversations in the comments. My summary of his advice (reassuringly consistent with my own experiences with "pragmalytic" approaches):

Start by solving for specific attribution / optimization use cases you face in the real world, not the more general form of the challenge. He names three dominant ones he sees: "O2S -- Online to Store", "AMS -- Across Multiple Screens", and "ADC -- Across Digital Channels"

Use multiple analytic techniques to compensate for imperfect data that any one technique might rely on. For example, if there are holes or quality problems with your data, supplement it with controlled tests

Don't cop out, but accept that there are no perfect answers, just better ones, and that you should bias toward acting on acceptably imperfect information and learning and improving based on actual experience

Absolutely terrific stuff here, gets even better on the third and subsequent reads.

July 03, 2012

In May 2007, Microsoft paid $6 billion to buy aQuantive. Today, only five years later, they wrote off the whole investment. Since I wrote about this a lot five years ago (here, here and here), it prompted me to think about what happened, and what I might learn. Here are a few observations:

1. 2006 / 2007 was a frothy time in the ad network market, both for ads and for the firms themselves, reflecting the economy in general.

2. Microsoft came late to the party, chasing aQuantive (desperately) after Google had taken DoubleClick off the table.

3. So, Microsoft paid a 100% premium to aQuantive's market cap to get the firm.

4. Here's the way Microsoft might have been seeing things at the time:

a. "Thick client OS and productivity applications business in decline -- the future is in the cloud."

b. "Cloud business model uncertain, but certainly lower price point than our desktop franchise; must explore all options; maybe an ad-supported version of a cloud-based productivity suite?"

c. "We have MSN. Why should someone else sit between us and our MSN advertisers and collect a toll on our non-premium, non-direct inventory? In fact, if we had an ad network, we could sit between advertisers and other publishers and collect a toll!"

5. Here's the way things played out:

a. The economy crashed a year later.

b. When budgets came back, they went first to the most accountable digital ad spend: search.

c. Microsoft had a new horse in that race: Bing (launched June 2009). Discretionary investment naturally flowed there.

f. Specialized players do continue to grow in "traditional" display, through better targeting technologies (BT) and through facilitating more efficient buys (for example, DataXu, which I wrote about here). But to grow you have to invest and innovate, and at Microsoft, by this point, as noted above, the money was going elsewhere.

g. So, if you're Microsoft, and you're getting left behind, what do you do? Take 'em with you! "Do not track by default" in IE 10 as of June 2012. That's old school medieval, dressed up in hipster specs and a porkpie hat. Steve Ballmer may be struggling strategically, but he's still as brutal as ever.

6. Perspective

a. $6 Big Ones is only 2% of MSFT's market cap. aQuantive may have come at a 2x premium, but it was worth the hedge. The rich are different from you and me.

b. The bigger issue though is how does MSFT steal a march on Google, Apple, Facebook? Hmmm. video's hot. Still bandwidth constrained, but that'll get better. And there's interactive video. Folks will eventually spend lots of time there, and ads will follow them. Google's got Hangouts, Facebook's got Facetime, Apple's got iChat... and now MSFT has Skype, for $8B. Hmm.

7. Postscripts:

a. Some of the smartest business guys I worked with at Bain in the late 90's (including Torrence Boone and Jason Trevisan) ended up at aQuantive and helped to build it into the success it was. An interesting alumni diaspora to follow.

b. Some of the smartest folks I worked with at Razorfish in the early 2000's (including Bob Lord) ended up at aQuantive. The best part is that Microsoft may have gotten more value from buying and selling Razorfish (to Publicis) than from buying and writing off the rest of aQuantive. Sweet, that.